Do Tools Ever 'Die?'

An anonymous reader writes "NPR recently ran a debate between two commenters regarding the perpetual lifespan of tools... in other words, that no tool ever goes completely out of use. This debate wasn't focused just on mechanical tools based on simple machines, but included electronics as well (vinyl record players, for example). Did you know you can still buy 8-inch floppy drives online? NPR is looking for examples of tools that have gone entirely out of use... any ideas, Slashdot?"

How sillilly obvious

[A nonymous Coward]

How many times have we read about NASA tapes and such from early missions where the hardware to read them has long since disappeared, and no one is even sure what format the tapes are in?

Re:How sillilly obvious

[sznupi]

TFA is about cherishing biases of our memory... We don't remember, we are hardly aware of those types of artifacts which disappeared.

The tools used to build StoneHenge

[gurps_npc]

Someone already mentioned the pyramids. The key thing about tools we no longer make is that we lose the NAMES for around the time we lose the tool. Because once we stop making them, we stop talking about them. Here is another example, from less than 200 years The original 'phonograph' used a wax cylinder instead of a vinyl LP disk. They had a 'mechanism' that would shave the cylinders, erasing the current recording and allowing you craft a new one. We don't make this tool anymore and no longer even have a name for it, siumply because we would NEVER under any circumstances, shave an existing 200 year old musical cylinder.

Re:The Internet in anti-government actions

[MikeDirnt69]

Censorship is a very usefull tool, one of the most ancient too. It can make other tools useless! And this is how you make a offtopic message "ontopic".

Nothing to see...

[dzfoo]

I heard the story on NPR this morning and I think it's overrated. In my opinion, by including in the report tools and inventions that are custom made for leisure or passion and not necessity or practical use, the scope of invention "death" is reduced artificially.

The report included some examples of old farming implements that are still in use in some developing countries, ostensibly because they cannot afford the newer technology and the old tools are certainly effective. These surely are examples of old technology that is still "alive."

However, the problem is that, while the authors concentrated on the advertisements shown on a late-19th Century Farmer's Almanac, and offer these as proof; they extrapolated their observations to apply to the entire breadth of all human civilizations.

I disagree with this. Obviously some inventions have become obsolete when newer and better technology superseded it. The fact that some fringe group or individual continues to manufacture ancient items for study or pleasure (with no intention to apply or use it in practice), does not mean that the technology is still "alive". Such technology is obsolete and out of circulation for practical use. Understanding or knowledge of it may still remain, but it is effectively dead.

Their thesis then can be rephrased as such: Knowledge acquired by humanity throughout the course of history is accumulated and seldom lost. This is a much more intuitive and obvious assertion than the original one, but also a much less interesting one.

          -dZ.

Re:Radioactive tools

[MightyYar]

What things are we eating and drinking that, 100 years from now, our descendants will wonder how we didn't all just keel over dead?

Beyond obvious things like tobacco, when I lived in NYC I was always struck by the rich inhabitants coming out of the Whole Foods with their organic produce and stepping into the exhaust fumes of a million cars and buses. Yeah, it'll be the Apples that kill you...

Re:Tools for Encryption

[KeithIrwin]

A scytale was a club carried by every Spartan (not Roman) officer. It was used as a bludgeon first and possibly a cryptographic tool second, but the historical records of its cryptographic use weren't written until a couple hundred years after the claimed use. None of the historical accounts which were contemporary to the time make any mention of them being used for any purpose other than hitting people (Sparta was known more for military might than for its intellect). So it's quite likely that their cryptographic use was invented after-the-fact by some historian and then repeated by others rather than an actual use.

I also disagree with the idea that either the hypothetical scytale or the cryptographic rotor have really gone out of use. People still, unfortunately, roll their own cryptographic schemes and one of the things that this implies is that they reinvent the wheel or sometimes randomly copy ideas from history. Hardware versions of the cryptographic rotor and the scytale are probably extinct, but the software implementations undoubtedly live on and are in use, even though they shouldn't be.

Re:Need some time

[tinkerghost]

Sorry the last Kodachrome processing line in the US just shut down a month or so ago --- you'll have to process them by hand.